When I was in my late twenties or early thirties (hard to keep track now….) in Houston, I was thinking a lot about how to achieve balance in my life.  I have always been a well rounded person, interested in multiple areas of study and life experiences.  So I was trying to figure out how to align all of my activities and interests into some kind of schedule or routine that would balance and satisfy all of the physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and creative components of my life.

One day, I rode my red Diamond Back mountain bike over to a park and stopped by the seesaws.  I suddenly thought maybe I could investigate balance by means of a physical experience.  So I climbed up onto one of the seesaws, exactly in the very center (the fulcrum in engineering lingo) to see what I could learn.  I tried to balance the seesaw just so, by holding very straight and still, thinking that it might be possible, if I could remain perfectly centered and balanced within my body.  However, I found that it really didn’t work that way at all – the seesaw would just tip and fall over to one direction or the other.  So instead, I decided to take an alternate approach and widened my stance, almost at a grand plie distance apart.  Of course, the seesaw started moving right away, but after awhile I got the hang of it.  By first leaning a little bit one way and then the other, I could keep the seesaw in a moving-kind-of-balance.  In the physical process of moving my body ever so slightly back and forth, over and over, I was able to find a sort of moving center or equilibrium.

All these years later, I thought it would be fun to go back to the park and do a photo shoot for this blogpost – maybe even try the balancing exercise again (clearly I was delusional.)  Anyway, it turned out that I couldn’t be sure that I had found the exact same park, and I definitely couldn’t find any seesaws anywhere, in any of the other playgrounds that I did find.  Apparently they must have been phased out, because of safety concerns.  So, instead I found this photo from my childhood. Right – I know it’s not a seesaw, but I was a pretty cute kid and this is the closest to a photo of me with a seesaw that I could find to share.  I do still have the red mountain bike, shown in this recent photo, that is currently in the shop being to fixed up so that I can ride again soon, now that I’m in Denver.

But, in any case, the bottom line is that I still remember the lesson well.  By never leaning too far to one pole or the other on the seesaw, I was able to anticipate the movement and achieve a moving equilibrium (well more or less.)  Paradoxically, it seems that the key to balance is movement.

Photo Credit 1: Jerry Henkener, circa 1967.

Photo Credit 2: Julie Henkener, 2022.